Erie butcher demystifies ground meat labels

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ERIE, Pa. -- My recipe for this week is for Kofta Curry, or Indian meatballs and gravy.

It's delicious and exotic, and completely doable in an American kitchen. You can find my tips for making the dish with the recipe on page 3D.

The recipe calls for 2 pounds of lean ground meat, so I'm using this space to explain a recent discovery:

When I started cooking about 11 years ago, I bought ground meat at big grocery stores labeled by fat content, such as "80 percent lean" or "90 percent lean."

I had a vague awareness of other names, such as "ground round," "ground chuck" and even "ground beef," but admittedly I didn't know what those terms meant.

My tiny Conneaut, Ohio, grocery store still uses the old-fashioned terms. I've stood near the meat case with a knitted brow for years, staring at them all, which proved to be a lousy way of figuring this out.

Finally I called Erie butcher Gerry Urbaniak to help straighten this out.

He said the traditional ground-meat labeling terms such as "round" and "chuck" refer to the part of the cow the meat comes from. People chose the meat based on what they were using it for.

As a general rule:

"Ground round" was more expensive because it's made from the round, the leanest ground meat they would grind, usually believed to be about 90 percent lean.

"Ground chuck" was assumed to be 80 percent lean. "Ground beef," made from other beef scraps, ran around 73 percent lean.

There was no way, though, for consumers to know the specific fat content, and doctors wanted a better system. So in the 1980s the U.S. Department of Agriculture changed the guidelines.

Meat purveyors are now required to physically test their ground meat mixtures by cooking some of it to see how much of it is fat. It became more important to know that percentage than the cut.

Urbaniak said his ground meat is labeled both by fat percentage as well as the cut that makes up most of the ground mixture. For example, he can put a "ground chuck" label on it as long as it contains 60 to 70 percent from that cut.

He also said my little store is probably not going to get in trouble for not listing the fat percentage unless someone really makes a stink.

That person is not going to be me. I'm actually glad I never complained about it, because apparently they're stocking lean (enough for me) ground meat all the time, right under my furrowed brow.